evolution Quotes

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

“I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious views of anyone.”

“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.”

“I think it inevitably follows, that as new species in the course of time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer, and finally extinct. The forms which stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improvement will naturally suffer most.”

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

“I believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number.”

Look, the Latin name for this fish is Carcharodon carcharias, okay? The closest ancestor we can find for it is something called Carcharodon megalodon, a fish that existed maybe thirty or forty thousand years ago. We have fossil teeth from megalodon. They’re six inches long. That would put the fish at between eighty and a hundred feet. And the teeth are exactly like the teeth you see in great whites today. What I’m getting at is, suppose the two fish are really one species. What’s to say megalodon is really extinct? Why should it be?

“In 1920 Roscoe Button’s first child was born. During the attendant festivities, however, no one thought it “the thing” to mention, that the little grubby boy, apparently about ten years of age who played around the house with lead soldiers and a miniature circus, was the new baby’s own grandfather.”

“Every child born into the world is nature’s attempt to make a perfect human being.”

“If only people were smarter, evolved enough to treat everyone the same even if they looked different.”

“The whole surface of the earth seemed changed – melting and flowing under my eyes.”

“We men, with our bicycles and road-skates, our Lilienthal soaring-machines, our guns and sticks and so forth, are just in the beginning of the evolution that the Martians have worked out.”

“The Upper-world people might once have been the favoured aristocracy . . . but that had long since passed away. The two species that had resulted from the evolution of man were sliding down towards, or had already arrived at, an altogether new relationship.”

“What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the cause of human intelligence and vigour? Hardship and freedom: conditions under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall.”

“As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time.”

“howard: What’re yuh skeered of? You was a worm once! melinda: (Shocked) I wasn’t neither. howard: You was so! When the whole world was covered with water, there was nothin’ but worms and blobs of jelly. And you and your whole family was worms!”

“The individual human mind. In a child’s power to master the multiplication table there is more sanctity than in all your shouted ‘Amens!‘, ‘Holy, Holies!’ and ‘Hosannahs!’ An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral. And the advance of man’s knowledge is more of a miracle than any sticks turned to snakes, or the parting of waters!”

“You will evolve. Not everyone will get it. Evolve anyway.”

“If he survived, those patterns would become eternal, for his genes would pass them on to future generations.”

“We are not saying that Evolution can’t exist, only that it is guided by His Noodly Appendage. And our Spaghedeity is extremely modest. For some reason, He went through a great deal of trouble to make us believe that Evolution is true--masking the prominent role of Pirates in our origins, making monkeys seem more important than they really are, generally keeping behind the scenes and out of the spotlight.”

“She came from a background where nothing was ever good enough. And that was something that weighed heavy on her. But in our house together, it was a sense of just trying stuff and allowing each other to fail and to be excited about things. That was liberating for her. It was exciting to see her grow and both of us grow and change together. But that’s also the hard part: growing without growing apart or changing without it scaring the other person. I still find myself having conversations with her in my mind. Rehashing old arguments and defending myself against something she said about me.”

“Well, basically I have intuition. I mean, the DNA of who I am is based on the millions of personalities of all the programmers who wrote me. But what makes me me is my ability to grow through my experiences. So basically, in every moment I’m evolving, just like you.”

“She told me about the scales on butterflies, and the way animals lived in ducts, sometimes whole herds. People would hear the stampeding through their walls. There were new kinds of fungus, she said, that were making jungles where the cables ran. There were slugs so big a toddler could ride them sidesaddle. ‘The natural world is so adaptable,’ she said. ‘So adaptable you wonder what’s natural.‘”

“Things are either devolving toward, or evolving from, nothingness.”

“Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of consciousness and the burning up of the ego.” ”

“Darwin’s theory of evolution is the last of the great nineteenth-century mystery religions. And as we speak it is now following Freudians and Marxism into the Nether regions, and I’m quite sure that Freud, Marx and Darwin are commiserating one with the other in the dark dungeon where discarded gods gather.”

“There are gaps in the fossil graveyard, places where there should be intermediate forms, but where there is nothing whatsoever instead. No paleontologist..denies that this is so. It is simply a fact, Darwin’s theory and the fossil record are in conflict.”

“Isn’t there a scent, an energy, a singing in the blood, a sharing of the soul? Or have we evolved from even that most basic ability, the deepest of human connections?”

“A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming.”

“Brother and sister were products of the highest strata of humanity’s evolution. In them the primitive had long ago been swept aside, been submerged by mechanization, been swamped by scientific development, been nullified by the standardized pattern of the white man’s way of life.”